If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? -- Shelley 1819
Dear all,
Wow! What huge amount of work you guys have done today! stock bacteria strains, miniprep, PCR, prepare and run a DNA agarose It's really really impressive! You guys should really give yourself a big big hand. I am so proud of you. We have gone through a very very physical day! This level of labor is probably approaching the maximum during your time here. So get some good rest! You will need it.
Some comments: It's true that we have NOT got our PCR working...YET. But I must tell you: the mental process you go through is a very enriching personal experience. Failures definitely come at some time during your research, it's just a matter of time. All of you are probably hit pretty hard, I could see that. But then when we start to focus on solutions, rather than the failure result itself, our mentality changed. Notice how senior researchers such as myself and especially Satoshi treat failures of this kind as norm. Actually even if we failed, we extracted a lot of information from this failure, which will guide us towards success. The key is in the expectation: if we understand the risk, we prepare for them in more ways than one!
What you are facing is what differs a real experiment and one in your lab courses: the unknown outcome! All the lab course assignments will work out if you perform your experiment correctly. Not in real life! As you will start to appreciate, learning this failure mode is an essential part of doing scientific research and we actually learned some lessons from this failure. We redesign and will try something out.
Matt did 40 new PCR conditions trying to change the progress: He is probably writing it down in his Lab notebook. (Matt, could you share your lab notebook with we all? I am sure the others are curious about the 40 conditions, what is the rationale behind them, what is Satoshi's later comment after he knew that you did 40 conditions, etc.)
I attached a PCR gel that worked before for your reference. Basically, I did 4 PCR reactions in a single day and got all of them working. One of the reactions has some slight nonspecific band, but the yield is good enough for me to proceed on. Take a look at the PCR conditions, the predicted PCR product length and the gel! Check to see if you are able to confirm the size of the PCR. The top right is a PCR reaction with another set of primers on the same template we utilized today: DNA2.0_ORF27
Just a reminder that we are NOT meeting at 9:15am tmr. As you know, I am sending my lovely wife to the SFO airport and I will probably be arriving during the noon. On the safe side, I will probably meet you all at around 2:45pm (since the LBL shuttle kind of arrives at 10 or 40 past).
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? -- Shelley 1819
Dear all,
Wow! What huge amount of work you guys have done today! stock bacteria
strains, miniprep, PCR, prepare and run a DNA agarose
It's really really impressive! You guys should really give yourself a
big big hand. I am so proud of you.
We have gone through a very very physical day! This level of labor is
probably approaching the maximum during your time here.
So get some good rest! You will need it.
Some comments:
It's true that we have NOT got our PCR working...YET. But I must tell
you: the mental process you go through is a very enriching personal
experience. Failures definitely come at some time during your research, it's just a matter of time.
All of you are probably hit pretty hard, I could see that. But then
when we start to focus on solutions, rather than the failure result
itself, our mentality changed. Notice how senior researchers such as
myself and especially Satoshi treat failures of this kind as norm.
Actually even if we failed, we extracted a lot of information from
this failure, which will guide us towards success.
The key is in the expectation: if we understand the risk, we prepare
for them in more ways than one!
What you are facing is what differs a real experiment and one in your
lab courses: the unknown outcome! All the lab course assignments will
work out if you perform your experiment correctly. Not in real life!
As you will start to appreciate, learning this failure mode is an
essential part of doing scientific research and we actually learned
some lessons from this failure. We redesign and will try something
out.
Matt did 40 new PCR conditions trying to change the progress: He is
probably writing it down in his Lab notebook.
(Matt, could you share your lab notebook with we all? I am sure the
others are curious about the 40 conditions, what is the rationale
behind them, what is Satoshi's later comment after he knew that you
did 40 conditions, etc.)
I attached a PCR gel that worked before for your reference.
Basically, I did 4 PCR reactions in a single day and got all of them working.
One of the reactions has some slight nonspecific band, but the yield
is good enough for me to proceed on.
Take a look at the PCR conditions, the predicted PCR product length
and the gel! Check to see if you are able to confirm the size of the
PCR.
The top right is a PCR reaction with another set of primers on the
same template we utilized today: DNA2.0_ORF27
Just a reminder that we are NOT meeting at 9:15am tmr.
As you know, I am sending my lovely wife to the SFO airport and I will
probably be arriving during the noon.
On the safe side, I will probably meet you all at around 2:45pm (since
the LBL shuttle kind of arrives at 10 or 40 past).
Sweet dreams!
Yours,
Jingwei Zhang